Approaching your advertising can be a bit of a daunting task, but fortunately there is an old school approach that holds just as true now as it did 100 years ago. The formula for advertising success can be summed up into four little letters AICA (Attention, Interest, Conviction, and Action). It’s not just the 4 elements that are important, but also the order in which they lay.
- Before anything will peak someone’s interest it must first get attention.
- Before anything will convince someone it must be of interest to them first.
- Before anything will cause someone to take action, they must be convinced to do so.
The main point being that when you’re advertising you have 4 steps to walk your prospects through and between those 4 steps there are 3 bridges you must get them to cross once you have their attention.
There’s real beauty in the simplicity of this formula that gives you a great framework to analyze your current marketing as well as formulate new marketing:
- Does it get attention?
- Once I have their attention is it interesting?
- Now that I have their interest does it convince them of anything?
- Great they’re convinced! Now what is the action I want them to take?
Now we know that marketing can get fancy, technical, complex, and strategic to taste. However, having a forwards and backwards understanding of AICA will harmonize the direction of your efforts which will bring consistency and effectiveness to your campaign. If something in your marketing isn’t working very well you can use this formula to hold it up to the light and find the disconnect.
Let’s take a moment to run through an example:
We have a letter that we send out to home owners who are on the NOD list and possibly facing foreclosure. Unfortunately we know that if we were able to get their information from this list, others have it to and will be sending letters. So our first objective is to get attention because we want them to open up our letter so we can reach phase 2 which is to gain their interest. This is where ideas such as handwritten addresses, using color and handwritten notes, or using some other form of differentiation to get their attention.
For all intensive purposes we succeed in getting their attention and they open up the envelope and now we are in the second phase and our objective here is to have content that will spark the interest of the reader. A pithy use of layout, professionalism, and presentation (such as bullet points, fonts, logos, bolds, and italics or key terms) to make the content itself look interesting. In this case the form of the content should break through to a bit of interest and a well placed headline can set the stage for you to convince them.
Now that you have them reading, this is the conviction phase where the time, thought, and effort you’ve put into the type comes into play. For our text we choose to try and convince them of the fact that they are on a slippery slope towards foreclosure, what will happen as they slip further down the slope, and encourage them to take action now… that working with a real estate professional will do much more good for them than if they do nothing at all and let their home go. We layout the reality for them and add a flavor that convinces them to talk to us. We want them to call; that is the action we want them to take!
There are many ways to apply the formula to your marketing approach... instead of convincing them to call you may decide to focus on having them visit your site for a free report. Best part is that all the efforts that go into the package can be unpacked, analyzed, and adjusted so you can test, track, and implement with a greater deal of clarity and freedom.
This was originally a concept that was recognized by the one of the Copywriter’s Hall of Fame’s most decorated inductees, Maxwell Sackheim, who throughout his 70+ years of success in advertising always adhered to the principles of the AICA formula.
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If you’re feeling motivated feel free to post your own walkthrough using the AICA formula in the comments and we’ll gladly take a look at them and leave you feedback on it to let you know whether or not you seem to have a grasp of the formula. Try it! It’s a fun and productive exercise! |
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